When I see people talking about Closure, I don't see them talking about the power they get from metaprogramming. It's almost the opposite, people talk about the safety of FP, and power from Category Theory.
For C++ templates, you get that impression and multiply by a few googols.
Now, Ruby and Python communities do claim to gain power from metaprogramming. I can say that Python metaprogramming is something completely different from Lisp's one, but Ruby's is more similar. Yet, both communities put a hard limit on the amount of "magic" you should use on your programs (where Ruby's limit is way higher than Python's), so it can not become the panacea that it is in Lisp.
Metaprogramming is one of the main selling points of Lisp, the only other being how easy it is to implement. Other languages have other features to show.
What people talk about category theory w/r/t Clojure? Since it has almost no type system to speak of, I'd be very curious to know what in the world they're on about.
Macros and the repl were, to me, the best part of clojure.
I see people talking about monads and applicatives all the time. I don't know Clojure, but I got the impression it has a powerful implicit type system.
For C++ templates, you get that impression and multiply by a few googols.
Now, Ruby and Python communities do claim to gain power from metaprogramming. I can say that Python metaprogramming is something completely different from Lisp's one, but Ruby's is more similar. Yet, both communities put a hard limit on the amount of "magic" you should use on your programs (where Ruby's limit is way higher than Python's), so it can not become the panacea that it is in Lisp.
Metaprogramming is one of the main selling points of Lisp, the only other being how easy it is to implement. Other languages have other features to show.